1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an automated method and a computer and data network assisted system for determining factors limiting production locally and site-specifically in agriculture and related industrial fields, and for evaluating the mutual significance thereof. Further, the invention provides a procedure for adjusting factors found to limit, or otherwise unfavorably affect production to a locally optimum level.
In agriculture such as plant production, farm animal production and forestry, methods used for planning and controlling the production are substantially based on information about the amount of the harvest (for instance dry matter per surface area), milk production per animal unit, or weight increase of an animal per day, or annual growth (for instance solid cubic meters or total logging outturn per surface area), and also about various quality factors having an influence on market values.
Moreover in plant production, controlling the production volume and quality is based on information about soil and the properties thereof such as soil type, soil fertility and factors affecting the water balance thereof. Actual growth may also be measured by means of aerial photographs, growth evaluations on site (using vegetation samples or estimates of point sampling devices) or by estimating any factors reducing production such as pests or plant diseases, nutrient deficiencies, factors affecting the water balance, or air pollution. Similarly in farm animal production, the control is based on information about pedigrees of farm animals in addition to growth, feeding and health data thereof.
2. Description of Related Art
Already at present, different site-specific information relative to agriculture is collected and recorded for future decisions. Such recording is done by land owners, farmers, cattle breeders, agricultural organizations or institutions, industries, or authorities. In agriculture, suitable means for acquiring information are for instance commercial design and expert systems to be used on production sites; for example the Finnish systems Farmit-Wisu, Agrineuvos, LORIS, and international systems RDS and Field Stars, utilized for automatic control of working machines and sampling; and further, EU's IACS (Integrated Administrative and Control System) statistics suitable for the administrative control of the production, for instance in case of subvention decisions.
Combination of above systems for acquiring information has made possible for instance market surveys and advisory services based on cross-tabulation and classification of farmers by data processing.
While relatively abundant site-specific information based on class averages is already available, it is not yet possible to verify the actual biological and agronomical factors having the greatest restricting site-specific influence for instance on the volume or quality of harvests, since sufficiently extensive data covering long enough periods of time, and also combined methods for the analysis thereof are still lacking. For this reason, it is not possible to direct correcting measures to such relevant factors. However, by directing said correcting measures to factors having the greatest restricting site-specific influence on the production, significant increase of the production volume and/or quality thereof could be achieved with available resources.
As an example, addition of nitrogen fertilizers by the farmer to increase the harvest is useless, if the amount of available water is the most significant factor limiting harvest volumes. On the other hand, one of the central ideas of site-specific cultivation that soil is fertilized according to the fertility thereof by applying for instance nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium using site-specifically single nutrient fertilizers is economically not the best alternative notwithstanding the fact that this would technically be possible at present. Site-specific control should more preferably be carried out only for nutrient(s) limiting the volume and/or quality of the harvest. Efficiencies of phosphorus and potassium being relatively low (less than 50%), site-specific application of a fertilizer may be carried out mainly as a corrective measure and as a maintenance fertilization independent of the growth rhythm of the plant, for instance as autumn fertilization before actual seeding. On the contrary, the efficiency of nitrogen is considerably higher (more than 50%), and therefore the site-specific application thereof should preferably be controlled during growth periods according to growth potential.
At present, prior art methods for utilizing acquired information provide a limited possibility to combine quantitative factors site-specifically. Further, no solution exist for the problem of exploiting all known quantitative factors together, and combining them with so-called qualitative factors (for instance information about any sprayed fungicides, influence of soil types or soil processing techniques, or moreover, the use of seeds from farmer's own farm or commercial certified seeds in the production). Utilization of this acquired and recorded data is further limited by the fact that the ability of expert systems used at various production sites to communicate with one another is not adequate for duplex data transfer, particularly not for duplex data transfer from the expert system to the data bank and back again to said expert system. Accordingly, possibility to interaction is lacking almost totally, and for this reason, the analysis of information, verification of site-specific problems, and evaluation of eventual site-specific solutions may not be carried out in a flexible manner.
Prior art applications are disclosed for instance in the following documents: U.S. Pat. No. 5,566,069, U.S. Pat. No. 5,870,689, EP 723391 B1, WO 9737372 and EP 797916 B1. However, these documents mainly focus on acquiring information and observation results at production sites, not on specific processing thereof. For instance the document U.S. 5,566,069 discloses a system for acquisition of agronomical information under field conditions to be recorded in a laptop computer, and transferring such recorded data via an information network to a database. Such systems for acquiring information are known and in common use in this field.